During journeys in such a vehicle, a coach or a boat etc., and in particular, tourist excursions, the passengers or tourists frequently do not receive adequate information at the optimum time and the information they do receive is not necessarily what they would like. Take the typical example of coach trips. Very few travel agencies have the services of a guide to give a commentary on the regions, towns or sites visited during the entire journey, suited to the type of passengers in terms of their language, age and reasons for taking part in the trip. Even though a guide has the advantage of being able to answer questions and facilitate relationships, this represents a substantial cost for the travel agencies and the guide's skills are necessarily limited. In addition, a guide can only comment on the towns or monuments, without illustrating them. On the other hand, coaches are normally equipped with videos to show films to entertain the passengers and a radio to create an ambience. If the video player is used to illustrate the sites visited, the driver must intervene to start it up. The cassette is not necessarily started at the opportune time. In addition, the selection of cassettes for each region is limited --as is the range of languages and content. Furthermore, this solution is not directly interactive with the travel agency and the coach route.
There exist on-board computer systems generally comprising portable computers with extension cards to allow connection via a modem to the phone network, used in particular, as office or remote management or data acquisition tools. Computer systems with global positioning systems, known as GPS, are generally used in the context of traffic prediction or radio guidance systems.
The European document EP-A-0 672 890 describes an on-board IT station for a bus, equipped with a GPS type location system. This station can store data, distribute it and trigger distribution of the data either manually or automatically depending on the GPS data. There is no resource which allows parametering a journey and selecting the type of information to be distributed depending on the type of audience or on a specific topic. The automatic mode takes into account solely the geographical position supplied by the GPS.
The Japanese document JP-A-07 225 897 describes a device for communication between a static IT station and a mobile IT station on-board a vehicle. The two stations are constantly in communication to ensure transmission of the data to be distributed from the static station to the mobile station depending on the position of the vehicle detected by a GPS type location system. The mobile station is not designed to operate in stand-alone mode. In addition, the transmission of data by radio does not allow distribution of all types of information such as video films, on account of the limited transmission speed. Nor does this device incorporate any means of parametering the journey and selecting the information to be distributed.